Harrison Ford is furious and doesn’t hide it. The 83-year-old American actor, star of blade runner and the Indiana Jones and Star Wars sagas, has decided to raise its very powerful voice to complain against none other than its president. The interpreter has not hesitated to describe Donald Trump as a bad leader and a liar, among other niceties.
For Ford, Trump “has no policies, only whims.” This is what he declared to Guardian during a conversation held in Chicago (his hometown), where on the night of Wednesday, October 29, he was given an award for his leadership in environmental conservation by the foundation of the late biologist and ecologist EO Wilson, with whom the actor came to forge a deep friendship. In the talk with the British media, published this Friday, Ford goes so far as to say of the now two-time occupant of the White House: “It’s incredible. I don’t know of any bigger criminal in history.”
“It scares me a lot,” he says of Trump. “Ignorance, arrogance, lies, perfidy. He knows what he is doing, but he is an instrument of the status quo and is making a lot of money while the world goes to hell,” he says.
Much of Ford’s attacks on Trump stem from the current US president’s disdain for climate change. The Republican president has even stated that he does not believe the data that shows how global warming is affecting the planet and, therefore, its citizens and the economy. In fact, one of his priorities upon coming to power in this second term was to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the pact signed in France in 2015 that requires that global temperatures not rise more than two degrees during this century. Without going any further, last month he stated before the UN that climate change was “the biggest scam in the world” and called it a “green scam.”
Instead, Ford has been raising its voice for decades to fight global warming. Hence, he stated in his conversation with the British newspaper that the president’s legacy regarding the climate crisis will be “a clear expression of ignorance, arrogance and deliberate subterfuge.” Trump has encouraged drilling for fossil fuels and says wind turbines are “ugly.” Meanwhile, Ford affirms that the president is against them “simply because he has not seen any goldfish.”
“I knew it was going to happen, I have been preaching this for 30 years,” says the actor about how the climate problem was going to cause disasters such as floods or fires; In fact, he himself was surrounded by the fires that devastated the city of Los Angeles last January. “Everything we have said about climate change has been true. Why is it not enough to alarm people and change their behavior? Because of the stagnation of the status quo”, he denounces.
“He is losing ground because everything he says is a lie,” the performer, nominated for an Oscar for his work in Witness in danger (1985). “I am convinced that we can mitigate climate change, that we can buy time to change behaviors, create new technologies and focus much more fully on the implementation of those policies. But we have to develop the political will and intellectual sophistication necessary to realize that human beings are capable of change. We have an incredible capacity for adaptation, we are incredibly inventive. If we focus on a problem, we can solve it more often than not.”
Ford assures during the talk that humanity is “on the brink of the abyss” regarding the pollution and deforestation problems that affect the planet. “Indigenous peoples are the guardians of much of the forests still standing and hope that these valuable places can be conserved. Science has demonstrated the value of their conservation, but that does not prevent them from being invaded, and the protection granted to them is weak in some of the countries where these assets are located.”
It is not the first time that Ford has raised his voice against those who oppose climate change. At the beginning of 2019, during a governance forum in Dubai, he already criticized all the deniers and, although without naming him, also Trump: “There are leaders around the world, including in my own country, who in order to preserve their situation and the status quo They deny or denigrate science. They are on the wrong side of history.” At the Climate Summit held in Madrid at the end of that same year, he already accused the president of “lack of courage” for his departure from the Paris Agreement and advocated for the defense of the environment: “We have to protect nature’s ability to support humanity. “We need to dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, accelerate the transition to clean and renewable energy, as a large part of the climate solution can come from protecting nature’s ability to store carbon.”
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